Ethnography?

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Apr 18 06:55:47 PDT 2001


Kelley Walker writes:


>>ethnography which involves "observation of culture in situ" for a
>>prolonged period of time
>
>you should stick to jane eyre or something. you are wrong. i have
>taught a couple of courses on methods, qualitative methods in
>particular. i am an ethnographer. i think i know what i'm talking
>about. the way to distinguish between marketing research and social
>science is to be found in an understanding of the difference between
>method and methodology. in the future, please refrain from this sort
>of rubbish. you are a intelligent woman who need not stoop to this
>sort of thing.
>
>"ethnography usually refers to forms of social research having a
>substantial number of the following features:
>
>* a strong emphasis on exploring the nature of particular social
>phenomena, rather than setting out to test hypotheses about them
>
>* a tendency to work primarily with "unstructured" data, that is,
>data that have not been coded at the point of data collection in
>terms of a closed set of analysis categories
>
>* investigation of a small number of cases, perhaps just one case.
>
>* analysis of data that involves explicit interpretation of the
>meanings and functions of human actions, the product of which mainly
>takes the form of verbal descriptions and explanations with
>quantification and statistical analysis playing a subordinate role."
>
>--Norman K. Denizin and Yvonna S. Lincoln _Strategies of Qualitative
>Inquiry_ p 110-111

At 9:38 AM -0400 4/18/01, Kelley Walker wrote:
>do you honestly think i should sit quietly by as yoshie tells
>everyone what sociology is? or how sociologists use the term
>ethnography? i don't tell her how to practice her discipline.

Alexander Massey says he is an ethnographer, just as you claim to be one, and his paper was presented at the Ethnography and Education Conference, Oxford University Department of Educational Studies (OUDES), 7-8 September, 1998, if you care about the question of expertise. Have you read Massey, "'The Way We Do Things Around Here': the Culture of Ethnography," at <http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/2961/waywedo.htm>), or are you just reflexively reacting to the emphasis on "observation of culture in situ" for a prolonged period of time (which is just one part of the definition that Massey discusses) because if that's one of the qualifications of ethnography Wolfe's work for _One Nation, After All_ may not count as such? While struggling with the ill defined nature of ethnographic work, Massey tries to provide a more precise definition than what Denizin & Lincoln offer above.

BTW, does Wolfe even claim that _One Nation, After All_ is a work of ethnography, rather than just a kind of "qualitative research"? Where's the evidence that he makes such a claim?

Yoshie



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